Bible takes very long road home

Niles couple cherish father's long-lost book.

NILES -- When Audrey Henson read a story in The Tribune about a class ring that was found in a lake some 50 years after it was lost, she thought of a Bible story.

Not a story told in the Bible, but one about a Bible — specifically her father’s. This Bible was lost in 1965 in Kenya, never to be seen again by its owner.

But nearly five decades later, the aged leather-bound Bible rests on a table in the Niles home of Audrey and John Henson, having been rescued three years ago in — of all places — Chile.

Audrey, 80, and John, 81, cherish the book that was so dear to her father. “I only wish he would have been alive when we got it back,” she says.

Her father, Ernest T. Gackenheimer, was a Seventh-day Adventist missionary who lost the Bible on a day he was serving as a guest pastor in a Nairobi, Kenya, church.

“When he walked to his car he dropped a sheath of papers,” John says. “So he laid his Bible on the top of his car while he picked up all his papers. But he forgot to get the Bible. When he drove off, it was lost.”

Gackenheimer realized what had happened when he reached the church, so he drove back home but his King James version was gone.

“He told the congregation that day about losing his Bible — and that plays into the story later on,” John says.

Gackenheimer and his wife, missionaries in several foreign countries over the years, returned home to the U.S. in 1972. He died in 1989 near Chattanooga, Tenn.

Meanwhile, Audrey and John were living in northern Georgia in June 2009 when they heard from a Baptist missionary in Iquique, Chile.

Stephanie Garcia was rummaging through books in a “junk store” in Iquique when she came across a Bible containing the name E.T. Gackenheimer, written in cursive. She even deduced from the scribbled notes about weddings and funerals that the Bible belonged to a pastor.

Searching the Internet, she learned about Gackenheimer and the whereabouts of his family. She e-mailed Shandelle Henson, Audrey and John’s daughter who is a math professor and department chair at Andrews University. When the family confirmed this was indeed his long-lost Bible, Garcia returned to the store to buy it.

“She paid for it in pesos for what would have been less than $3,” John says, “and then shipped it to us.”

The store owner told her the Bible came to him in a barrel of items from the United States.

The Hensons, meanwhile, moved to Niles last year to be closer to their daughter, who has a story of her own about the lost Bible.

Shandelle was speaking to a church group in the state of Washington a couple of years ago when she mentioned the story of her grandfather’s lost Bible in Kenya. Incredibly, a gentleman approached her afterward and said that as a young man in Nairobi in 1965 he was in the congregation when the preacher talked about losing his Bible. He provided more details about the incident.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Shandelle says.

Nor could she believe the family got the Bible back after all these years. “That was almost like getting a note from my grandfather — a Bible with all his scribblings in it,” Shandelle says.

Although he is not certain, John believes his father-in-law likely used this Bible when he married Audrey and John 61 years ago.

Regardless, the Bible is home. And of its travels, Audrey says, “what a story could be told ... were all of the facts only known.”